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How outsourcing your contact centre can greatly reduce overheads

Outsourced contact centres have gotten a bit of a bad name over the years, with companies like BT and Vodaphone famously closing their overseas contact centres to bring operations back to the UK.

However, outsourcing your contact centre doesn’t have to mean sending calls overseas. There are a number of outsourced contact centres right here in the UK which can reduce your overheads while still providing the standard of service your customers expect.

1. Reduce Salary Spending

One of the biggest outgoings when you run a contact centre is staff. When you employ staff yourself, you have to pay them on an hourly basis whether they’re taking calls or not.

This is ok when you’re talking about a normal receptionist, but when it comes to a contact centre it’s a completely different story.

To make sure you never miss a call, you’d have to have enough staff on every shift to cover the maximum number of concurrent calls you receive.

What that means is that if you know you’ll have 10 calls hitting when phone lines open, you need 10 bums on seats read to take those calls.

And that’s great for 9 oclock when phonelines are busy, but what about a few hours later when you only have 3 or 4 calls coming in? That’s 7 people you’re paying who are sat around “just in case”.

That’s why staffing a contact centre is so expensive – because it’s easy to end up paying for operator’s down time just so you’ve got cover there if you need it.

When you outsource your contact centre that’s not a problem. You’re billed on a per call or a per minute basis so you only pay for the exact amount of time spent answering your calls.

It completely removes the issue of paying people who aren’t taking calls, and it can significantly reduce your outgoings on wages.

2. IT Support

One of the biggest challenges in a contact centre is the technical side of things. Being able to route calls to free operators isn’t a simple task, and it can take a lot of expertise, time, and hardware to do.

You can try and implement this yourself, but you could easily end up running into hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment in infrastructure just to set up a modest sized contact centre.

When you outsource your contact centre you don’t have to spend a penny on IT. The whole contact centre is already set up, and you don’t have to pay for an IT team to run everything – it comes as part of the package.

And it’s not just money you save. Outsourcing saves you a ton of time and headache trying to get your contact centre to work. It can be far from a straight forward process so it’s definitely a benefit to be able to put the problem on someone else’s plate.

The building

Have you ever been in a industry leading outsourced contact centre?

Well if you’ve not, here’s the main thing you notice – they’re huge!

Modern contact centres are far from the stereotype of people stuffed into cubicles. With noise reduction and staff welfare as a priority, contact centres today are often more relaxed open plan affairs with lots of space between operators to reduce noise.

What this means however is that they are big.

Do you have a big, spacious building going spare to build your contact centre into?

I didn’t think so.

When you outsource your contact centre everything is already done for you. You don’t need to move people around to fit the contact centre into your building, and you don’t have to move to bigger offices to accommodate a state of the art contact centre.

It’s all already done for you as an out of the box solution.

UK outsourced contact centres

Today, there are a number of great outsourced contact centres right here in the UK that can save you money while also providing both you and your customers with a great service.

Because they’re UK based they’re already compliant with the data protection act and all other relevant legislation, and the operators taking the call will be UK based with clear accents and an understanding of local dialects and slang. This makes the process much smoother and easier for customers.